Category: Politics

Published quickly in 2017 to hand out at the Women’s March.

This Is Important issue #2 covers the many different ways that people have told a particular story. The story is of Ida B. Wells busting into the middle of the 1913 women’s march in Washington, DC where she had been told she would have to go to the back of the march rather than walk with the women from Illinois in the procession ordered by U.S. state.

As I read up on this incident and on the march, inspired by the group Heterodoxy, and the histories of racism in the US and England’s feminist movements, I took notes for this later zine. Different sources told the story differently and I had to go back to original sources as far as possible. My suspicion was that Ida was not (as many sources claimed) the only black woman at the march. That just couldn’t be true!

The 1913 Women Suffrage Parade has infinite depth!

The result: Plumbed some depths of arguments between various white feminists at the time pro and con “letting” the black women from Chicago march with white women from Illinois. I found some fascinating and lovely records of the Alpha Women’s Suffrage Club from Chicago, and of a black women’s sorority that formed at Howard University specifically in order to march together in DC.

I see now that this march is going to be on the new $20 bill design in 2020. I wonder if it will be all about white woman on a white horse or if they might put an illustration of Ida in her sash and fancy hat. We’ll see.

A tiny zine from a few years ago. This is on the history of Heterodoxy, a long-running feminist group in New York City from the early 20th century. There are archival boxes with material from the group in various university libraries.

One thing I noticed while reading up on Heterodoxy was vile racism from some members’ propaganda plays and articles and speeches. This led to a further zine, Ida at the March.

But, this zine was originally inspired by a conspicuous and deliberate absence from Wikipedia: Marie Jenney Howe’s page was redirected to her husband’s page. I ended up writing this zine to express my un-Wikipediable feelings. The other result, which is much calmer, is this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Jenney_Howe

THIS IS IMPORTANT is a new zine series from Burn This Press.

Issue #1 (December 2016) is Take Back the Narrative (Ongoing Action) by Andrea Hairston, playwright, novelist, and director. Take Back the Narrative was published originally on the Aqueduct Press blog, Ambling Along the Aqueduct and is reprinted as a zine with the author’s permission.

Here is a PDF of the zine! It is meant to be printed as a two-sided page, then cut along the long axis of the page. Then collate it, fold, and staple across the short edge.

Download the PDF(254K): THIS IS IMPORTANT #1

Thanks to Laura Henry for layout. And, homage to poet, rabble rouser, and bullshit artist F.A. Nettelbeck for his original THIS IS IMPORTANT zine series. I figure he would not roll over too hard in his grave if he heard I was ripping off his zine title.